Ecogirl suggested that I post my speech from the press conference – so here it is!

“Thank you everyone for being here for this celebration!

While our Observatory Director Dave Lane is going to tell you about the Medjuck telescope and our plans for the Burke-Gaffney Observatory in detail, I just want to take a couple of minutes of your time to talk about the impact of astronomy on campus.

Everything you are is a product of your experiences and choices.

And a great education informs both of these; by exposing you to new – sometimes breathtaking – experiences, and providing you with the knowledge and frameworks you need to make good choices.

Those thoughts are really what drove the renovation of the Burke-Gaffney Observatory. Any student that studies astronomy, whether in introductory courses for non-scientists or the more specialized honours program, will have a chance to use the Medjuck telescope for observing projects. Thanks to our enthusiastic telescope operators you don’t even have to know your eyepiece from your elbow to be able to use the telescope!

But even more exciting is the possibility of robotic control. Dave Lane has done a remarkable job in bringing the observatory up-to-date. He can now control it entirely from home, and as you’ll see today, a social media interface is in the works. Need to get a picture of a galaxy for your ASTR1000 project? Try tweeting.

But access alone isn’t the most amazing thing about the renovation. The gorgeous new 24.5 inch Medjuck telescope is the second largest campus telescope in Canada. With a modern optical design it produces stunning images, significantly better than our beloved Ealing telescope. It is a fantastic piece of research grade equipment – indeed a model just like it has been cold tested for deployment in the Arctic. We know it works down to -35 C, so I guarantee we’ll still be running in the middle of winter!

But to give you an idea of its capabilities, just a day before one of the first viewing sessions with the new telescope, a supernova went off in a neighbouring galaxy (and for those of you that don’t know, the first supernova ever discovered in Canada was discovered from the BGO in 1995). But how far away was that supernova? 11.5 million light years. To put that in context, the light from that supernova left before the great-apes had truly started evolving on the savannah of Africa. There were no humans anywhere.

I’ll leave it to the words of seven year old girl to describe what she thought of seeing the supernova and how old it was: “That’s soooo cool!!!”

But this isn’t even close to pushing the limits of the Medjuck Telescope. The most distant object it will be able to see, the not very romantically called 3C273, is 2.5 billion light years away. The light that we are now receiving from it left when the only form of life on Earth was single cell bacteria. No plants. No higher forms of life. The fossil cliffs at Joggins were still 2.2 billion years from being formed.

Just think about this for a second:

You now have a chance to put light in your eye that has travelled across almost 20% of the entire Universe. To be influenced by something that is unimaginably distant, something incredibly old. That’s a breathtaking experience. It may not be full of heart pumping adrenaline, but it makes you realize something quite profound – that even the most distant of things can have an impact on how you see the world and yourself.

And by now you’ve also realized that astronomy isn’t just about charting the skies. It’s about time-travel too. You probably didn’t think of the Medjuck Telescope as a time-machine, but in some sense that’s exactly what it is.

Above all this, we should see the chance to have these experiences, and the knowledge that comes with them, as a gift. Thanks to the generosity of Dr Medjuck the support of the University, and hard work by dedicated individuals, we’re incredibly excited and just a little bit proud in Astronomy and Physics to be able to share these experiences both with everyone on campus, and also the community of Halifax. And through social media, perhaps soon the world!

Over the past 18 months Cosmoboy has been honoured to be a part of the Burke-Gaffney Observatory renovations at Saint Mary’s University. Built in 1972 to honour Father Burke-Gaffney, it has become an icon of the Saint Mary’s campus. But in all that time it has never had significant renovations – beyond CCD upgrades – and much has changed in astronomy technology. By the time of the 40th anniversary it was clear that revitalization of the BGO was needed!

Plans were hatched by the Observatory Director Dave Lane and Cosmoboy in the fall of 2012. The ambitious renovation proposal included a new 24.5 inch telescope (from Planewave, their CDK24 model), and adding an observing deck so we could show more of the sky at a given time. That would also increase the student and visitor capacity of the observatory – we’ve had days when the queue went down the stairs… Which doesn’t make it much fun anyone.

The University was supportive from the get-go, but budgets were tight and we were asking for significant funds. In the end, our Office of Advancement came to the rescue and through our President’s Office the well known local philanthropist Dr Ralph M. Medjuck was approached. As many people in town are aware, Dr Medjuck and his wife Mrs Shirlee Medjuck (right with their daughter Linda) have donated considerable sums to Halifax universities in support of education. To cut to the chase, Dr Medjuck agreed to support the project, and we named the telescope in his honour.

I’ve said thank you to our benefactors so many times already, but I can’t write this blog post without saying thanks again to Dr and Mrs Medjuck. Without their support, and that of Saint Mary’s University at large, this project would not have been possible.

But cut to April 2013, things were moving forward. At that point we decided the project was a “sufficiently big deal” for the university and the department that we should make a short documentary on it. Local filmmaker and astronomy fan Martin Hellmich agreed to take the challenge on! The resulting film can be seen here – watch it in HD! There are some really fantastic time-lapses in there – we were pretty gobsmacked when Martin first showed them to us! Go watch it!

Painting of the dome and mount happened during the summer of 2013 and turned out to be much more of an adventure than we had anticipated. To cut a long story short, you really need to prime well! But we all think the final look is great – the white of the pier matches the black and white of the Medjuck telescope perfectly, while the blue accents the small details on the ‘scope. Kudos to Dave Lane for picking out the colours! Note, the paint has to stand up to some tough conditions – the observatory gets brutally hot in the summer and cold in the winter (snow will often sneak into the dome through the gap between the rotating and stationary parts).

Fencing off the observatory deck also encountered a few glitches. The initial drilling was done at the end of exam time and understandably some complaints were made about the noise! So we held off finishing that until all the exams were done. But the end product looks great, and we all agree the view from 22 floors up is simply mind-blowing – especially at night! So if we get parents that aren’t too interested in astronomy bringing their children along to open houses, we still have something to take their breath away.

Of course, the most fun part of the whole project was the new telescope arrival and installation! With a 6 month delivery time, we had our fingers crossed it would be delivered just before Christmas 2013 so that we could swap it in for the new term starting in January 2014. Everything went to plan. But installing a new telescope in the middle of December in Canada is a chilly proposition! So we had to borrow a 5kW heater to warm things up. The 40 year old mount bolts were just fine as well, despite us being very worried about the possibility of things breaking!

And finally bringing the story up-to-date, this week (October 2014) we’ve been able to celebrate the installation and thank everyone involved! There’s still a lot of work to be done on the social media side, but the hardware is all in place. The press events this week went off fantastic, and some of our friends in the media did an awesome job of letting people in Halifax know about the renovations (here, here, here, here). We’re just over the Moon (sorry! :) ) to have everything get to this point!

So please, if you’re in Halifax and want to take look, reserve a ticket and come to a public night! We’d love to see you there!

Today’s announcement of gravitational waves being detected coming from the original Big Bang (well not really, but we’ll get into that below) which was measured by the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole has got a ton of attention on the internet. (So much so the web servers broke down under the load!). This is big news because it confirms theories about the expansion of the universe since the Big Bang, and opens up the doors to some new discoveries. There’s even a really quite wonderful YouTube movie of Dr Andrei Linde, one of the co-developers of the so-called ‘Inflationary Cosmology’ theory, being told about the results.

The fact is though, this isn’t an easy topic to explain. The discovery of the Higgs Boson particle came with its own simple explanations (“Oh…it’s the thing that gives things mass..”). However, for the BICEP2 results, it’s much harder to explain the implications. Most people can get that the team of BICEP2 scientists are telling us something important about what happened just after the Big Bang – which happened 13.8 billions of years ago – but what exactly? And why should we care?

So here’s my top ten list of facts and questions about the results 1 that may help put things in perspective!

10. What are gravitational waves and why do they matter?

On an everyday basis we think of space and time as just there. But many people know that Dr Albert Einstein showed space and time are actually combined into one four dimensional object known as space-time. With his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein also showed that space-time can have very specific ripples pass through it – these ripples are called ‘gravitational waves‘. Gravitational waves are very, very weak and hard to detect. Indeed decades of direct detection experiments that measure distortions of space-time have failed to come up with a true measurement. Yet those measurements are indicative of incredibly powerful events, like merging black holes or, as in today’s announcement, the phenomenal energies of the Universe just after the Big Bang.

9. What does BICEP2 stand for and how has the BICEP2 experiment detected gravitational waves?

First the easy one: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization. OK, so there’s a bunch of things in the name alone, and let’s start there. The polarization aspect is really the key one. BICEP2 has been measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background, relic radiation left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang (which is still about 13.4 billion years ago!) We’ve actually made a lot of measurements of this radiation before, but the key part of BICEP2 is that it has measured the polarization of radiation (light waves have a specific direction for their wave form, that direction measures the polarization, see here) to exquisite precision. Here’s a map from today’s press release:

Great! Erm, why is this polarization interesting? Well because the polarization encodes within it the signal of gravitational waves. The distortions of space produced by gravitational waves can induce a distortion that is kind of spiral-like, and you can see evidence of those patterns in the above image. It’s this signal that BICEP2 has been able to find… and it wasn’t an easy process due to other types of distortions occurring during the massive changes after the Big Bang (in fact I wasn’t expecting to see a detection like this for while!).

8. Haven’t we found evidence of gravitational waves before?

Indirectly, yes. In fact the 1993 Nobel prize in Physics was awarded to Hulse and Taylor for the study of a binary pulsar whose orbital decay (i.e. loss of energy) is beautifully explained by the launching of gravitational waves that take energy away from the system.

You might be thinking that today’s measurement is also indirect, in the sense we’re measuring the distortions on the polarization of photons at one particular point in time — namely when the light that forms the cosmic microwave background was emitted (its energy is reduced as the Universe expands making the wavelength change from around visible light to microwaves). Perhaps this is somewhat indirect, but it isn’t all that different from measuring the changes in space time that direct-measurement experiments try to find, in some experiments, such as LIGO lasers are used to measure space-time distances and gravitational changes in the universe 2.

7. What is the inflationary theory and why do we need it?

OK… This is a tough one to do in a short paragraph, but basically we don’t understand why the Universe appears so uniform over such large scales. If we wind the clock back with our conventional models for the evolution of the Universe, then we find there are regions that couldn’t possibly have shared information due to the limit on the speed of light – so why would they look similar? You could argue that everything had started similarly at the very beginning after the Big Bang somehow (!?). Scientifically, that idea isn’t very popular because it lacks a true explanation.

The ‘Inflationary Cosmology’ theoretical model solves this problem quite neatly by having a period of expansion that was much faster (that’s waaaaay faster) than standard cosmological models predict. That way, regions that were thought not to be in contact actually were at one point… Rapid inflation also helps a explain a few other things too, such as why it looks like the energy densities of the Universe add up to an almost perfectly balanced number (the so-called critical density). Many people think that without the ‘Inflationary Cosmology’ theory, we have a hard time explaining why the Universe is still in existence!

6. BICEP2 (grey dish on top of blue building) doesn’t look much like a telescope, it looks like a satellite dish why’s that?

You’ve pretty much nailed it. The BICEP facility is detecting similar wavelengths to some satellite or communication dishes – microwaves. So it isn’t going to look like a nice tube similar to an optical telescope. (Actually the big white dish in the photo is the South Pole Telescope – a competing facility!)

5. Why did they put it at the South Pole?

Aside from being miles and miles away from signals that would interfere with the telescope, the South Pole is also incredibly dry. That’s really important because the microwaves carrying all the information from just after the Big Bang have to travel billions of light years across our observable Universe to reach us. But then that radiation still has to get through the water vapour in our atmosphere. Why is that a problem? Well because water vapour is a really strong absorber of certain wavelengths of microwaves (that’s how we heat up things in a microwave oven for example!). So the less water vapour above your microwave telescope, the better 3.

4. Could this possibly be a false detection?

That seems pretty unlikely, but isn’t impossible. The team announcing the results have tried to be as careful as possible, although there is always concern about false signals and misinterpretations of data. However, it seems very unlikely that the signal is coming from dust in interstellar space, or from a very specific type of electromagnetic radiation called synchroton radiation, which also produces the particular patterns measured. A few blogs are also talking about the fact that perhaps the statistical tests look almost “too good” and that they may possibly be “systematic errors”, namely errors that basically enforce their results rather than being merely random. This is another tough issue which will be subject to much scrutiny over the next few weeks. That’s how science works! You can be sure these results will rigourously investigated.

3. Are we going to need another experiment to confirm this one?

Well, perhaps not to confirm this particular set of data — but yes, we are going to need better measurements, preferably on larger and smaller scales on the sky. That’s because if we really do want to start pinning down the physics precisely, then absolutely, more measurements are needed! (see below!) But the good news is that upcoming data from the European Union’s Planck satellite measuring microwave radiation polarization over the entire sky, and possibly BICEPs competitor the South Pole Telescope, which is another microwave telescope, this time run by University of Chicago, may well add to the evidence. Actually a few people are saying they won’t trust today’s results until they see those from the Planck satellite.

2. Some people are talking about “quantum gravity” as well, why’s that?

The quantum theory of gravity is considered by many as the Holy Grail of theoretical physics (Albert Einstein was deeply interested in it in his later years). The quantum theory of gravity seeks to reconcile gravity, one of the four fundamental forces in our current universe with quantum mechanics. After decades of study, we have candidate theories (e.g. string theory) but we do not yet have complete working description of this mindbogglingly complex physics. It’s important because the quantum theory of gravity describes the highest energies we can think about, and that means it is the the theory that is most relevant to the Big Bang.

A number of theorists have pointed out that the gravitational waves that have been detected today are most probably the direct result of quantum gravity (see here for a really very technical discussion!) That makes today’s announcement even more profound. But that said, there is a slight fly in the ointment, namely there may be other methods of producing primordial gravitational waves.

But regardless, many people are incredibly excited about the possibility that with this signal, or perhaps better measurements, we can start putting real bounds on theories of quantum gravity. At this early stage though, a large number of important details make it difficult to predict the precise impact. But I think it’s important to remember this is a field with close to zero experimental information, so any useful measurements are going to be of enormous value.

1. Why should I care and what is this “new physics” that people are talking about?

Although particle accelerators can probe high energies for individual sub-atomic particles, they are still 12 orders of magnitude away from investigating the fundamental energies present during inflation after the Big Bang (as suggested by today’s results). And you really don’t want a Big Bang happening in your backyard anyway – there’s too much energy! The BICEP2 results arguably give us the first deep insight into the state of the Universe when it had an energy under 1/100th of that associated with the highest energy theorists spend time thinking about, which is the “Planck energy“.

Why should you care? Firstly, it is incredible that humanity has pretty much figured out the nature of the Universe all the way back to just before the Creation Event. We’ve been at this game since the late 1960’s (arguably) and we inhabit a fairly innocuous planet, around a comparatively unimportant star, in a seemingly unimportant galaxy! Those facts alone are enough to make your head spin… We only figured out that our planet revolved around the Sun 450 years ago!

Secondly, almost every time we learn something profound about the nature of the cosmos, whether it’s time and space, or the particles within it, our culture has been notably impacted. From relativity to neutrinos, new ideas soak back into our common lexicon and impact how we think about the Universe and the world we inhabit. As I mentioned above we may be making our first baby-steps toward figuring out problems that Einstein made little to no impact on.

Thirdly, we’re never going to be able probe this new physics in a laboratory – the energies are just too high! So the Universe is the only lab we have for measuring these physical theories!

Lastly, if you watch the Big Bang Theory tv program, you can be sure that they’ll have an episode on this result soon, and you want to be ahead of the game for that don’t you? :)

Congrats to the BICEP2 group – hopefully this result will stand-up to scrutiny. If it does, it’s a really, really big deal!

—

Footnotes:1.A note: this post is not for specialists. For those who’d like delve more into this amazing discovery, there have been some spectacular posts by others at that technical level (e.g. here, here and here and plenty of others).

2. Update – there’s actually a big debate over this in professional circles, but really it’s a good detection method, IMHO.

3. Of course the absolutely best thing to do is just to simply build a telescope in space like the Planck satellite. But building and operating such a space telescope is incredibly expensive…

OK first post in a while! This one is going to carry on the photography theme, but as a first, this one is from Cosmoboy…

On Feb 21-23 I went on a photo tour of the Valley of Fire (just outside Las Vegas) promoted primarily by Steve Huff and organized by Todd Hatakeyama, with pro-togs Jay Bartlett and Albert Evangelista helping to make things run smoothly. To say it was a welcome relief to get away from all the snow in Nova Scotia was an understatement – two days in the Sun was absolute luxury. I felt like a gecko enjoying the Sun in the Sahara! It was great to meet all the other participants on the tour and I think everyone had a awesome time.

Although the daylight Sun was still fairly low, lighting was nonetheless quite harsh. So I found myself drawn to black and white. The backdrop of wavelike rock formations also made for some great tones. The shot I’ve chosen to post about – “Dueling cameras” – shows both the amazing tones, and also some of the fun we were having that afternoon.

The big shoulders in the foreground belong to Jay Bartlett, and workshop participant Sumant Nagarkar is standing on the rock in the distance. For a few seconds before I took this shot they had been shouting back and forth about how things looked and who had the better shot – and at the moment I couldn’t resist just capturing the two of them dueling over who was going to get the better image!

I didn’t frame the shot perfectly, I’d have liked Jay to be slightly more to the left because I wanted to mirror the symmetry of the two “head-like” rock formations (the white one in the right middle, to the darker one in the top right) in the positions of Jay and Sumant. But I didn’t have time to do that! The shot is also about a stop under exposed, which I could have corrected in post, but hey this is just a little study…

The direction of Jay’s hat is really important to the picture too. Again it isn’t absolutely perfect, since it directs you down the line of symmetry of the two rock formations, and it should probably be a little more toward Sumant, but maybe the compositional tension works? It does create a strong diagonal, while Jay’s right arm pulls you back in the direction of Sumant nicely.

Lastly, I lucked out a bit on the darker tones at the bottom of the shot naturally framing things. I new the sky would be reasonably dark, but I was pretty fortunate to have just a line of darker tone along the bottom to stop your eye wondering out the bottom of the frame. If you cover that last piece up the image just doesn’t look balanced at all.

Overall, I’m really quite happy with this image as it captures a lot of the fun we were having in the afternoon, and unlike many of the shots I took that afternoon it was composed in literally a second!

PS Special thanks to Jay for a great dinner chat about the ups and downs of pro photography!

As I wondered around Lunenburg on a beautiful calm Sunday morning, my attention was primarily on reflections on the calm waters. However, the soft light also cast interesting shadows and enhanced colours on the buildings around me. Even industrial components and weather-battered surfaces had a lovely glow due to the sunlight and refractions softening the shadows. The photograph here is of three electric transformers and their floating shadows along an old red shed. Strong vertical lines created by the supporting pole, its shadow and the two white lines on the shed balance the image. Horizontal electric wires and their shadows connect all the shapes. The squat trio of transformers and their shadows keep the image centred among all the criss-crossing lines.

As I walked along on the Lunenburg water front on a calm still Sunday morning, I came across this little yellow sailing boat next to a large working ship. As I moved a bit further along the dock to get into a better position to view the reflections, the yellow stood out in stark contrast with the blue and red reflections mirrored in the water. Keeping in with my theme of creating abstract images, I zoomed close, focusing on the colours and patterns, which seems to give this image a sense of abstract reality. What is floating in what? As I paused by this scene, I realized that the round buoys were creating their own elliptical reflections contrasting with the portholes and the painted circle on the ship (which I think indicates the location of the thruster below the waterline). The slightly askew vertical mast (and its reflection) helps to tie together the multiple horizontal lines in the calm image.

I got up early Sunday morning after the wedding celebrations and looked out our little dormer window at the top. It was gorgeous outside, so I quietly left the hotel to walk by the waterfront. As on most early summer mornings in Nova Scotia, the water was very calm. The mirrored stillness in addition to the bright soft morning light resulted in lovely reflections everywhere.

I liked this particular image for a number of reasons: the contrast of the crisp yellow lines against the blue; the more organic patterns of the rust stains tracking salt water pouring out of the drain holes, the shapes of various openings, all of which tell stories about the ship, its use and its design. The ship itself cast a shadow on the side I was on, so its reflection in the water was darker. However, the water itself acted as a reflector of the bright sun, thereby brightening up the side of the ship itself. This back and forth conversation of light and colour, industrial design and nature, created a dynamic image full of both tension and stillness. The yellow lines create an arrow pointing towards the sea, which to me, created a sense of destination and movement within this static tension.